Day off, Dublin

Finally the sun shone. No-one had an early start today, so we could all surface in our own time and embrace a day off. Days off on Sunday count double, as theres little chance that youll be bothered by the world at large.

I laid low for much of the day, then in the late afternoon headed down to Joes house. He & his family were hosting a get together for a few folks from the tour, friends and neighbours. How they could summon the energy to go into hospitality mode I cant imagine, but it was wonderful that they did.

There were probably 30 of us, lounging in the back garden drinking Guinness or Murphys, noshing on great food, chatting, playing with the puppy, etc. Everyone really relaxed, which is so hard to do in the middle of tour madness. The sunshine helped a great deal - there was barely a cloud in the sky for the whole day. It made the time seem precious in a way. Laughs, conversations, it felt very valuable to spend time in a different, low pressure context with people who we see every day but are usually barely capable of stringing a sentence together. Time well spent.

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Latest Willie's Diary

Within the bands entourage (certainly by comparison to the crews clockwork scheduling) travel departure times are often a little loose. This morning was especially so, due to three contradictory memos which had been emailed out last night and this morning.

There was a 6.30pm conference call arranged between Bono (Dublin), The Edge (Los Angeles), Steve Matthews (London) and myself (also London) to blow the cobwebs off our brains and discuss the reincarnation of the Vertigo Tour.

I was planning on resurrecting the tour diary today, being the day we were scheduled to fly to Auckland for the load-in tomorrow. However, its now old news that the remainder of the tour dates have been postponed, so Im not going anywhere further than the corner cafe. Its been a very weird week indeed - much akin to driving into a wall.